New dorm lockout policy calls for $200 fine
Photo illustration by Teal Gordon/The Daily Northwestern
As part of a new University policy, on-campus dorm residents who get locked out of their rooms and need help from their community assistant three times will be charged $200 for a lock change.
October 2, 2012
As part of a new university policy, on-campus dorm residents who get locked out and need their community assistant to unlock their door three times will be charged $200 for a lock change. The policy applies whether students have lost their keys or not.
For each lockout, dorm residents will go through a three-step process, including receiving a copy of a ticket tracking their lockouts, showing their keys to their community assistant, and meeting with the area coordinator, according to an email sent Sept. 26 to 1835 Hinman residents by community assistant Vivian Wang.
"For your third lockout, you will be charged $200 for a lock change fee and will be asked to meet with the area coordinator," Wang, a SESP junior, said in the email. "This policy is held throughout the school year."
An email outlining the same policy was also sent to residents of Allison Residential Community, Shepard Residential College and Public Affairs Residential College on Monday night by SHARC's area coordinator, Keenan Colquitt.
Colquitt mentioned that residents are allowed two free lockouts before they are charged. He noted the process would restart following the fourth lockout and said it is possible for a students' locks to be repeatedly "re-cored" if they continue to lock themselves out.
This new protocol does not replace the lost keys policy, which states that the standard fee is $181 for a lock change if a resident loses the keys to his or her room.
Previous university policy for lockouts involved charging students small fees for every lockout, according to the Division of Student Affairs residential services website. The website states that the money collected through these fees would be donated to charity.
Currently, the residential services website reflects the old policy. Multiple representatives from University Residential Life could repeatedly not be reached, and multiple area coordinators declined to comment on the change. When contacted, University spokesman Alan Cubbage said he was unaware of the new policy.
Pascual O'Dogherty, a McCormick sophomore living in Rogers House, said he preferred the lockout policy of past years.
“The lockout fee they already have (is) annoying to pay, and it’s a hassle, (but) it’s a good reminder to take the keys with you,” O'Dogherty said. “To increase dramatically that fee after the third time you lock yourself out – it’s more of a punishment than a lesson.”
But Communication sophomore Cassie Bowers said financial burdens are a major concern, especially for students who would have difficulty paying the fee.
“I don’t understand why they need $200 to let you into your room three times,” said Bowers, who lives in 1835 Hinman. She said she believes that involving a fiscal punishment creates an unfair standard, and said her friend lost his keys last year and had to pay the fee.
“Since he was from a family that could handle it, it was okay,” she said. “It makes it so that people who don’t have money have to be really, really careful. And people who can pay it, it doesn’t necessarily make them more responsible.”
Some students, including Bowers, were not aware of the change in policy or had heard of it only by word of mouth.
“Especially for me as a returning sophomore, most of those (mass) emails have been about things that I already knew about, so I haven’t been particularly thorough about reading those,” Bowers said.
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How about the CAs, you know the people with free housing and meal plans, just do their jobs.
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Julie Reply:
October 3rd, 2012 at 9:46 am
Though I agree that this is a ridiculous policy, as an ex-CA, I take offense with your wording. I can assure you that CAs don't get "free" housing or meals. The housing and meal plans CAs are provided with are compensation for their job. If you were working any other job where you got paid in real currency, I'm not sure you would like it if someone asked you to lend them the "free" money that you got paid from working that job. I know this is extreme, but I feel like a lot of people don't notice just how much of a job being a CA actually is.
Sure, there are crappy CAs. But for the most part, these students are working hard to foster a sense of community, plan events, go to meetings, deal with drunk / high / belligerent residents, get woken up at all hours of the night because of said residents, beg housekeeping to come clean more than once a week because the female residents keep throwing tampons on the floor, deal with the inept powers-that-be over at Res Life, and still manage to be productive students.
Either way, I can assure you, it would take a lot more than a meal plan and housing to get me to do that job again.
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This policy seems unreasonable and unfair:
1. The doors at dorms such as1835 Hinman are badly engineered; students can accidently lock themselves out while still leaving their keys in their room, since the door can be locked without using keys. Dorms such as Shepard do not have this problem, so some students would be more likely to pay fees than others based on a factor that they cannot change. (In addition, students in singles will be more likely to pay the fine since they cannot rely on a roommate)
2. No matter what the purpose of the fine (a deterrent? a punishment? - Res Life better do some research on the outcomes of conducting a large fine), a $200 fine will affect students differently: $200 is nothing for a wealthy student, while it could be an entire week's worth of compensation from an on-campus job for another student! I hope CAs voice their opinion against this policy, considering many take up this position to offset expensive room and board costs.
3. Such a large fine might cause students to take drastic and unneccessary measures to wait for a roommate to return in lieu of paying the fine, such as skipping a test or quiz, sleeping in the lounge, leaving the building without appropriate clothing, etc. I'm sure additional stressed out and angry students will subtract from the friendly and open community dynamic that res life is trying to create.
What could be done instead?
1. Keeping $5-10 fines since it is a mild, reasonable deterrent and causes the student to weigh the benefits of immediately calling a CA and waiting for his/her roommate.
2. Meeting with the area coordinator might not be a bad idea, since it's still a deterrent. In addition, the student might be more likely to listen to an authority figure as he/she spells out some strategies to not lock oneself out.
3. Fulfilling community service for the dorm might help as well. Since the student eats into the CAs time (and possibly wakes them up at odd hours in the night), the student could give back to the dorm by organizing a dorm activity, tacking up flyers, etc.
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At this point, I'm starting to think that NU is just trying to get students to move out and live in apartments. The dorms and meal plans are already scandalously overpriced by any estimation, doubly so when one considers the state of the dorms (the dining halls aren't much to write home about, either). Tack on a $200 fee for being repeatedly locked out of your room (which, as previous commenters have mentioned, is likely to happen, given the mind-boggling design of some of these doors), and it's as if they're almost going out of their way to make the dorms unpleasant. My response to this is the same response I've always had to dorms: Prison cells for the price of nice apartments, go live off campus.
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I appreciate how outraged you're all getting by this, but seriously just keep your keys on you if you need to. Doors are pretty straightforward mechanisms. Yeah, some of them are more prone to locking behind you than others, so check it before you head out. If you get locked out of your room once, it happens. If it gets up to three times, you're just being forgetful and inconveniencing the people who have to help you.
Maybe $200 is a bit much, so I agree with Tara's third point. Having people who repeatedly get locked out of their rooms help the CA's/dorm is a good idea. They (CA's) do have to put a lot of time into their jobs and having an extra set of hands to hang flyers, organize events, etc. would definitely lighten their load appreciably.
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I definitely agree with Tara P. As an ex-CA, I feel that this policy is incredibly counterproductive and in fact, will force the CAs into a very rough relationship with their residents. It was already hard enough getting my rezzies to pay the $5 charge, even when they woke me up at a ridiculous hour, and I can't imagine why any respectable CA would feel better asking for $200 even if the resident has had multiple issues in the past.
What my staff adopted was an increasing fee for our repeated offenders, so after maybe every 3rd-5th offense within the month, the student would have to pay $5 more for each lockout. In a dorm like Hinman (which many of my fellow CAs on staff used to work in), lockouts were EXTREMELY common. This new policy doesn't take any of the student's feelings into perspective-- it's often just as annoying to the student to not be able to get into his/her own room as it is for the CA to drop everything to help.
What I would add to Tara's proposal is nominal increases in the fee after a certain number of lockouts. This way, the student is receiving a policy action that reflects the offense, and hopefully eventually paying over $20 per lockout would deter them from making the same mistake.
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